Monday, December 22, 2008

In Which I Save The Magic Of Hanukkah From Noah Millman

if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom. So, ironically, the modern transformation of Hanukkah from a festival of intolerance to a festival of religious freedom is no transformation at all!

If we understand "declaring that the other guy is a heretic" to mean "thinking and saying that the other guy's beliefs about God are untrue", that isn't intolerence. That's just disagreement. People disagree about lots of stuff. Jon Henke and I disagree on how effective government intervention in the economy can be, but it'd be weird to say that we're being intolerant of each other. We can perfectly well be tolerant (that is, avoid using coercive power against people just because their beliefs and practices differ from ours) while preserving religious freedom (that is, the freedom to believe and practice a religion without coercion). In fact, the two things go together, contra Millman's attempts to serve up the big counterintuitive conclusion.

Now, if we understand "declaring that the other guy is a heretic" to mean "using the coercive power of the state to have him tied to a pole and set on fire", that would be intolerant. But religious freedom plainly doesn't involve the freedom to declare the other guy a heretic in that sense. Really, I think the multiple meanings of 'heretic' were making Millman's point look more plausible than it was.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.